Adjacencies: work together better by knowing more about how others work
I have a hypothesis: the more you understand other disciplines the better you can collaborate with people from those disciplines. Working in multidisciplinary teams assumes the team has all the skills it needs to get the job, but by creating silos of skills within the team. If everyone on the team had some skills from all the disciplines they work with there would bean overlap effect that help everyone understand each other better. Shared knowledge creates shared understanding and a more effective team.
So I want to test this hypothesis in a vary unscientific way by doing courses in adjacent skill sets to mine, writing a guide about that jobs skill set, and try to get people to read them and learn a how bunch of adjacent skills to see if it does help work better with their colleagues.
Since it’s an area I know, I’ll start with digital jobs:
- Product manager
- Service designer
- Delivery manager
- Content editor
- Project manager
- Business analyst
- User Interface/Interaction Designer
- Developer
- Data scientist
First, because I’ve already done the course, is Service Design. I need to write some kind of guide to service design for non service designers, including the history of the discipline, tools and techniques, methods, applications and limitations.
I don’t know how long this is going to take me, but maybe once I’ve done all of these I can think about even more adjacent jobs and expand outwards.